Configure Fabric Groups - vRealize Automation Series Part 9

Nov 19, 2014 • Jonathan Frappier

Time for Fabric Groups, and no a fabric group is not what Grandma does on Saturday afternoons at the senior center. Fabric groups in the vRealize Automation / vCloud Automation Center world is a collection of resources, this tends to send folks who have been storage focused for a long time down a different path as they start thinking about zoning and switches.

There can be multiple fabric groups with different purposes, for example you may assign clusters to different business groups to ensure performance, or at least that one group does not “hog” all of the resources available (though as we’ll see later there are other ways to control that).

As this is a resource being configured, we again log in with someone that as the Infrastructure admin role, in our case the iaasadmin user :

Click on the Infrastructure tab >> Groups >> Fabric Groups

Click on New Fabric Group

Provide a name for your fabric group, in my case I'll use vxprt

Assign a user to as a fabric administrator - remember we may have different groups using different fabrics and you may want to have someone in engineering manage their resources and a separate person in QA to manage the resources in their fabric group. Or you could have a single fabric group that is assigned to various users. The choice is yours. In my case I am going to assign the iaasadmin user as the fabric administrator. Start typing the name in, click the magnifying glass icon then click on the user

In compute resources, you will see the cluster from the vCenter server you added when you added the vSphere endpoint, had you not followed the last blog post you would have no endpoint, thus no resources - unless you already knew to do that on your own of course! Select your cluster and click the OK button

For fun, click on New Fabric group again - did you think your cluster assigned to your previous admin group would still be available? Logic might suggests that once I assign a cluster to a fabric group I should not be able to reuse it, however fabric groups are not how we control resource consumption, they are used for administration by other users.

That’s it, pretty easy. If you like you can create multiple fabric groups to mimic what you might do in a production environment or play around with adding different clusters if you have those kinds of resources. In my next post we will setup machine prefixes and business groups - which have to be done in that order, you can’t create a business group without a machine prefix (seems out of order to me but hey I’m not a programmer).

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With administrative users setup so we can actually configure various options in vRealize Automation / vCloud Automation Center - its now time to add some compute resource, so we can actually deploy things! Endpoints in vRealize Automation / vCloud Automation Center can be several things:

Hypervisor management platforms such as vCenter, vCenter Orchestrator, and SCVMM

If you recall from the IaaS installation post, one of the options asked us to name the vCenter endpoint, now we are going to log in and configure our vCenter server as an endpoint so we can use it to deploy virtual machines through the catalog.

Log into your vRealize Automation / vCloud Automation Center appliance (in my case https://vxprt-vcac01.vxprt.local/vcac) as.... do you recall from the last post who to log in as? That's right iaasadmin as that user was assigned the infrastructure administrator role which can manage endpoints

Once logged in, click on the infrastructure tab >> Monitoring >> Log

Notice here the errors related to the VRM agent occurring every minute, that is because we have not added our vCenter server yet

Click Back to infrastructure, then click on Endpoints >> Endpoints

Hover over New Endpoint >> Virtual and click on vSphere (vCenter)

We will need to name the endpoint, the URL to the vCenter SDK and credentials. Since we have not already, I would create a user account in AD called svc_vra_vcbind and add it to the vcAdmins group (assuming you followed along on the home lab build, or give it admin permission directly to your vCenter)

Credentials: Click the ellipse, then New Credentials and add a user account with permission to vCenter and click the green circle with the checkmark

With all the information filled in, click the OK button

Once vCenter has been added, return to the log view, you should notice that the VRM Agent errors are no longer occurring

Now you’ve added resources vRealize Automation / vCloud Automation Center can use to fulfill requests, however we still need to assign those compute resources to a fabric group, which will be next in my vRealize series!

We are cruising right along here in our vRealize Automation / vCloud Automation Center setup. So far we have everything installed, permissions assigned, a vCenter endpoint added and fabric group created with the cluster from our vCenter server. Now its time to setup business groups. Business groups are just a logical group of users, this may be done per department, per project or per external customer. We can publish catalog items to business groups, so when planning your business groups think of the things certain groups may or may not need. For example you may want a business group for your QA department that only has access to builds that are currently being tested so they do not chose the wrong version to deploy, or not want finance see HRs catalog items. Consider helpdesk users, you may want to publish certain catalog items for them to do certain tasks like create AD users and groups through vCenter Orchestrator workflows or PowerShell scripts - the possibilities are seemingly endless.